For the first Sunday of Lent, the scripture takes us back to the very beginning, long before recorded history, to the creation of the first human beings in the Garden of Eden. It takes us back to the time of the original innocence in which we were created. It also takes us to the fall of the first human beings from their state of innocence. This story is one that was told over and over again until it became a part of the sacred story of God's involvement with human beings; an involvement that we understand was from the beginning.
Since Adam and Eve were the first people, what was true for them was to be true for all people who were to come after them. Thus because Adam and Eve fell from their innocence, all the people who were to follow them were to come into the world with the mark of the fall. We are all born with an inherited frailty. It's what the Church calls original sin. Every human being is born with this kind of sin, although it's through no fault of our own to begin with. It's simply how we come into world. In our human nature we inherit what was essential about the first human being, including his fallen nature.
The single point to consider is that all of us are sinners. No one can escape from it. In the second reading St. Paul tells us that all have sinned. Yet surprisingly in our world this is a contested reality. It is the case that many people do not believe there is such a thing as sin. I encountered the belief that there is really no such thing as sin among classmates when I studied philosophy and theology.
It reminds me of when I became a Catholic going through the RCIA. While we were preparing for the Sacrament of Reconciliation, one of the people in the class claimed that confession was going to be difficult for her because she had never committed a sin in her whole life. I always found that hard to imagine, as I did back then, though I tried not to be judgmental. When I think back on my classmates—who were actually studying to be Christian ministers—and the woman in RCIA, I don't know how successful they were later with their Christian faith because recognizing that we have sin, that we are all born with the need for God to save us from our weaknesses, is key to Christian growth.
It's a common belief among many people, especially people without faith in God or without beliefs, that we are left to determine the rightness and wrongness of our actions by weighing each situation individually. For example, many people believe that truth telling has to be determined by what the outcome of it will be. Sometimes people of faith also are tempted to weigh the morality of our actions according to the situation at the time. However, for the past several weeks we have been listening to lessons from Jesus in the gospels where he clearly lets us know that there is a definite right and wrong and it is not what people commonly think of in terms of right and wrong. He issues challenges that run strongly against what we think of in terms of right action.
For Jesus sin comes across to us as a series of failures: the failure to love the unlovable, the failure to be generous beyond expectation, and the failure to make peace when vengeance seems right, the failure to be merciful and forgiving to those who have severely wronged us, and the failure to reach out to the poor and marginal of the world whom we may believe should just help themselves. Jesus comes to show us a better way.
In our gospel today we see that even Jesus was tempted. Often the temptation to sin or to fail comes in the areas where we might be weakest. The devil thought that he could tempt Jesus with power or with physical hunger. The story of the temptation shows us Jesus' humanity, which is a new humanity unlike what we inherit from Adam. Each one of us receives it by being made new in Baptism after the image of Jesus' new humanity, which, unlike what we receive from Adam, has won victory over temptation and sin.
The inclination to fail is a human state of being, but it doesn't have to be the final or definitive state of being. The journey of Lent invites us to consider who we are in our frailty, but moreover to consider the possibility of what we might become in Christ.
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